Rejection really does hurt

WHEN someone suffers social exclusion their brain lights up in two of the same regions as when they are in physical pain, brain scans have shown.

A team led by Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, used MRI to view the brains of students playing a computer game of “catch”. The volunteers were told they were interacting with two other students, but in fact the computer controlled the other players. After each student had received the ball seven times, the computer players stopped throwing it to them.

The minor distress this caused lit up an area called the anterior cingulate cortex, an emotional alarm system that lights up in response to pain and when a mother hears her baby’s cry. Another region linked to pain, the right ventral prefrontal cortex, also lit up (Science, vol 302, p 290). “This doesn’t mean a broken arm hurts exactly the

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